words in workings

there's a rather remarkable codex of sigils posted on Frequency23 just now. it's an intriguing piece of work for me especially; i do not often work in sigils. i've found the author's output in this field truly interesting, though i know i'm not understanding even a fraction of the meaning that's there.

juxtaposed with this precision artwork are several posted articles and discussions on the forum concerning the nature of different things, but all hinging on the word "belief" and its derivatives.

those of us who work with words know how subtle, deceitful, tricksy, false and just generally sloppy words are. it's the nature of the medium, no matter how precise we try to be. since so many of these conversations are turning on the word "belief" specifically, i'd like to open the discourse on how to use the word, and perhaps offer some words that have been generally found to better reflect the concepts we're trying to communicate -- and in some cases, manifest.

"belief" is intellectual laziness. it's a meme that's replicated itself in our psyches, unconsciously passed on to us by those who knew no better. it is a conviction of the truth, rather than an experience of it. we carry it like we do hundreds of viruses, without having experienced it, passing it onto others without realizing, without understanding. we communicate it to others as if it were truth born of our own knowingness when it is not.

there are at least three different ways of "knowing" something. in the age of enlightenment, humanity legitimized one way of knowing --logic-- at the expense of the other two. our forebears were taught that the only things that really existed could be grasped with one of the five physical senses and framed in logical structures, shared with others in this way, and thus ratified by common experience. anything else simply didn't exist, or suffered a lesser existence (love, hate, fear, grief, depression, god, thoughts, psychoses --all imaginings that would someday reveal themselves to logical empiricism, or so it was "believed").

thus bastardized, the other two channels for "knowing" something were almost completely lost. in our attempts to rediscover them, we've had to resort to poor substitutes to describe what we think we know that doesn't fit into logic's neat little boxes. one of those substitutes was the concept of "belief" -- and religions and tyrancies have been riding hard on this one, ever since.

a "belief" is a meme you hold in your head without any way of knowing its truth. as such beliefs interfere with your ability to experience what is true for yourself. if you fervently believe in a literal heaven, for instance, you're not going to be able to accept that it's just other galaxies out there in the night sky. pictures of supernovae and stellar nurseries and spectacular nebulae won't sway you--they're just the sparkling hem of god's robes. even if you should have a direct experience of being in the heart of a supernova through altered states of awareness* induced through meditation (or less desirably, through illness or drugs), you're likely to reduce that experience to an hallucination and dismiss it. your "belief" in what you've been told is absolute. it admits no refutation, and that belief will even trump personal experience.

beliefs are insidious. i have come to understand that they are every bit as effective a tool as fear in controlling human beings. if you can instill a belief in someone (in 2003 saddam hussein still had weapons of mass destruction) it allows you to justify a hell of a lot of stupidity in the name of that belief (the current quagmire in iraq being exempli gratis).

think i'm overstating? the harris poll as of february 2005 revealed that
36 percent still "believed" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. according to the pew forum on religion and public life, 42% of americans "believe" that life on earth exists now, in the same form, as it always has.

what's more, they believe these things not because they've experienced them as truth, but simply because they've been told.

i'd like to propose that those of us interested in being the authors of our own lives and/or magickal workings in any sense begin using the word "belief" in just this sense -- not as a form of knowing, but as a cipher standing in for real experience. what's more, i'd like to see each of us dedicated to rooting out these memes in favor of personal experience, or, failing that, the promise to simply keep our minds open to possibility.

for instance, i have never experienced "heaven" in the literal biblical sense of it. many others claim to have done so, but i have not -- therefore i'm keeping an open mind about the concept. the multiverse is stranger than i can know, and maybe there is a literal biblical heaven on some strand of reality i haven't yet accessed. in the meantime, i'm free to engage in the experience of discovery. i am the author of my experience. i haven't sold any part of my soul out to a "belief" that just wants to live rent-free in my psyche and replicate itself in others.

if i could give two gifts to the world (or even just to boards like Freq23), the second would be to eradicate "belief" in favor of experience.

the first would be to reinstate with equal vigor, acceptance and understanding the other two ways of knowing.

but that is an article for another day.


* - altered states of awareness are the second way of "knowing."